Still here – but not for long
Yep. We’re still here. Even though we are so happy staying here – it’s very comfortable – we still are getting increasingly itchy feet, and the open road is calling us more every day. We have had incredibly much to do now that our funding has disappeared, and we have to raise funds to continue, as well. We spend a lot of time at the computer, and we’ve done lots of work on the bikes.
Website improvements, website lockdown, and organizational issues
We’ve continued our work on updating our site to reflect the new company, Traveling Roses. We are still catching up on blogs and on the photo galleries, and we are writing additional pages on things like choosing clothing and equipment, the top questions we are always asked, text for our gift registry text, and more. We are also collecting our “hundreds” of bits of paper that have accumulated (or that we threw in our bags in a panic when we left) and we are inputting all those into a Word document so we can access the information easily and without being weighed down by all that paper weight.
We had a panic last week and this week – Chelsea has been trying to post a new header/banner for our site, but she doesn’t really know php as a programming language, and we don’t have the proper software to be able to do it easily. She was successful in putting a new name up, but it came up as just a white box overlaying our banner (you may have noticed it recently). In trying to get it to look a little better, she posted a new version, and our whole site locked up. We worked many, many hours trying to get it fixed, and spent hours and hours with the technical help on our hosting server trying to get it settled. We finally did get it fixed late last night, and we are so relieved! Right before it locked up, we had also had trouble with a number of pages disappearing and showing as “access denied”. We’re not sure still what happened with that one, but we are fixing them today. We are also moving around a number of pages and changing links so things are more organized.
One funny thing that came out of all the panic is a set of comments Chelsea came up with, for use in communicating with your technical Help Desk overseas. We’ll work them into an article and post it for you. It gave us some serious belly laughs at 2 a.m. as were still trying to work with our hosting server help desk (located in Bulgaria). I’ll give a couple of examples here – please note that at the time, our technician’s name was Stanislav, and English was clearly not his native language:
Suggestions for communicating with your Technical Help Desk
“Yo Stan my man,
Wasssup!! Why ain’t it working yet??? We are like, SO not digging this. Step up to the plate and batter up! You ‘n’ us ain’t even in the same ballpark!!
Rosemary”
“Dear Stan,
We regret to inform you that you have been of very little assistance to us in this matter. We are formally requesting that you get your **** together and solve the damn problem. What the hell do you think we’re paying you for? Late night entertainment?
Rosemary”
“Next time I need help on the website, I’ll ask my kid brother. It’ll get done faster.”
“We’ve tried all those things FOUR TIMES. Got any more excellent advice?”
New blog format
We’ve also acceded to several requests for our readers to be able to post comments right away to our blogs, so we changed our format to do that, with the understanding and agreement that we will moderate the blog post comments. So, now when you read the blogs you can let us know what your thoughts are, or give us some encouraging and inspirational comments!
Pimping our rides
Chelsea has been learning how to do most of the work on the bikes, and the bikes are in great shape. We have re-cabled the brakes with Teflon cable – a step up in quality from what we had; our brakes have been adjusted; our wheels trued; Chelsea’s front wheel bearing has been re-packed; and all kinds of other adjustments have been completed – including quieting the annoying rattle from my water bottle cage.
But the best part is how we’ve been able to “pimp the ride” on our trailers. Up to this point we have had a cargo rack that has required a two-handed operation to lift up in order to access the trailers. The metal buttons pinch our fingers, and they require a 3-step process of pinching them up to get to the highest level. Even then, it’s still hard to get complete access to everything in the trailer. After lots of discussion about strategy, Mark has taken off the (heavy) side struts and has hand sewn (with an awl and heavy duty cord/thread) a clever system of buckles. It still takes two hands to do the buckle, but it’s one step to undo it, and now the cargo rack flips all the way back, giving us really good access to the contents of the trailers. And even better is that the cargo rack can now double as a drying rack when we are in camp. So, with some time and effort and cleverness, and very little money, we now have greatly increased efficiency and a significant weight savings (over 2 lbs.).
Not only has the accessibility of the trailer been improved, we have replaced most of our zinc bolts with stainless ones, and have also added two water bottle cages to the back of our trailers. This now gives us the option of carrying our fuel bottles in the back and not with our clothing and equipment, and it gives us an option to carry more water. We are starting the process of preparing for Mexico and Central and South America where we may have longer distances to go in between food and fuel.
Primal Wear
Mark, unbeknownst to us, wrote to Primal Wear to see if they would do some “team” jerseys for us. They are an innovative and high quality company that manufactures cycling clothing. We’ve always loved a number of their jersey designs. Much to our delight, though they couldn’t do the team jerseys, they donated us each a set of jerseys – we opted for an under layer jersey and a beautiful long sleeve jersey. We’ll be getting them on Friday, so we’ll take photos and let you see how great they look.
Headed out to Seattle
We are at long last heading out again. Next Tuesday evening we are flying from Boston’s’ Logan Airport to Seattle Washington, where we’ll stay with our good buddy Pat Celi. We’re bringing our bikes and gear with us on the plane. We hope to be up in Vancouver within a day or two, and we are hoping for a break in the rainy storms the Pacific North West has been having so we can cycle on back down to Seattle in a few days. We’ll be spending Halloween in Seattle, and we’ll take off right after that to cycle down the coast through Washington and Oregon. We are pretty excited!
Hero of the Month
I’m giving Chelsea the Hero of the Month for her work in learning how to do the bike mechanicking, even down to re-cabling both of our bikes.
Signing off from Dover NH